Searching for Balance

I was led to the dining room table and Grandma Nancy set a bowl of chili in front of me with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, silverware, a soda pop, and then two slices of pie. I was worn but clean now, and glad to be getting fed full at what was both the end of a long day and the start of my first hiatus.

It can truthfully be said that I have never eaten so well or so much in an equivalent length of time as I did in the following week. The days passed by increments measured in the time between feasts. Mornings began with breakfast toast and cereal tiding us over until the lunch that was planned. In the case that there were no large lunch on a given day we could expect a big supper that night. Not a single day came in which my stomach's limits went untested.

A general listing of the meals and their contents should convey an accurate picture. Excluding snacks, I attempted to keep track, but please forgive me if some stray dishes have escaped the company of their companions here (there were so many!): chili, a buffet in Amish country (bread pudding and plethora other dishes), cheese sampling at a cheese factory, cheese and crackers, hot sausage sandwich and beer at Geisen Haus, Memorial Day fried chicken and jojos, tuna noodle casserole, sausage and sauerkraut, a Sunday morning breakfast buffet (custom omelet, muffins, etc.), family cookout burgers, dogs, deviled eggs and macaroni salad, a dinner buffet, a spice cake, pizza, chips, and pop, and finally the pies! Very berry, peanut butter cream, chocolate cream, lemon meringue, another very berry, and a cherry.

This should speak for itself.

After I'd finished dinner everyone came together in the living room and played cards. Mindy wandered about our feet under the card table while we played, hoping for leftover food scraps and the local weather report and tornado warnings buzzed behind us on the television. The past three nights had brought in cloud cover and sudden, heavy thunderstorms, but tonight I'd sleep in a bed beneath a solid roof safe from the rain and wind.

The next day I helped Justin in the garage to get his bike out of its shipping box and reassembled.

“We'll get you some dignity again, Bullseye,” he said to it soothingly.

The neighbor's dog came charging in. He curiously sniffed about us, looked up, barked once, and returned to sniffing. He appeared to be a mix of beagle and something else, his hunting nature searching for some invisible foe.

The neighbor appeared in the driveway, saw what we were doing and seemed to become excited, “Hey! So you guys must be the ones taking the big trip! That's quite an adventure I'd say. Hey, Calvin, get over here!” he yelled to his dog. He talked to us a minute longer and then returned to the other side of the bushes separating the properties. Calvin followed along at his heels, trying to chew his shoes as he tried to walk.

“Calvin, yep, that's my feet! He doesn't do that to anybody else, you know, just me,” he called back to us from out of sight.

Most of the week was filled with eating or sleeping or in waiting for the one or the other. My poison ivy rash had initially grown worse, primarily on my left foot in which a layer of fluid swelled up beneath the skin (chills run down my neck now just thinking about it). I'll say no more about it other than it went slowly away and scabbed over. Just writing that much about it makes me physically uncomfortable.

Memorial Day afternoon Grandpa pulled the car out of the garage and we all got in to go to Aunt Sandy's cookout. On the drive through town Justin pointed out the restaurants, stores, and other landmarks he recognized as we passed them, paging through fuzzy childhood memories. He confirmed their accuracy against the memory of his grandparents, casting his fragmented stories like lines to fish more full or entirely fresh ones from the depths of his grandparents' combined pond of recollection.

“I remember Lake Mohawk. I used to love it there,” he said. “Of all the places I remember from coming up here as a kid that's the one that stands out most. So many good memories there. Isn't that where we...,” he retreated into the foothills of a story and, as if from a distance, looked up with expectation to his grandparents seated in the front of the car.

We pulled up to the house and the cousins were playing basketball in the driveway. We went in passed the three dogs, and came out on the back porch. It was a warm day with a deep blue sky overhead spread with a few thin, stippling clouds. Grandpa took shelter in the shade of a large tree which hung partly over the porch and the rest of us sat around the glass table. Aunt Sandy and Uncle Gene came out and they all began to talk with each other about the changing times in the way families do, having been known each other through a changing past. Justin's cousin Michelle came out and then people began to swim in the above-ground pool. The water's temperature had just recently begun to reach comfortable levels. Me and Justin were soon in the basement finding out how bad we were at billiards.

At some point during the few hours we played, the fried chicken and jojos (elsewhere known as potato wedges or steak fries) arrived. Being wise to our appetites, everyone had gathered their first plate of food before telling us it was time to eat. Later in the week this happened again, twice, before we learned to not be so easily fooled.

Nine o'clock on Wednesday Grandpa had us help him with the weekly yard work. He putted around the front and back lawns seated on his red riding mower in the morning heat, wearing blue shorts and suspenders, fishers cap propped on top his head, and a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Justin took the push mower around the smaller spaces and I brushed at the detailed edges with a weed whacker. Afterward he had me climb up onto the roof and pull out clumps of helicopter seeds accumulating in the corners of the gutters. The last task he had for us was to fell a small, bent tree that was starving its neighboring trees for light. The only payment Justin's grandparents asked for the vast amount of food, a week of nights in the warmth of a bed, and our participation in all their kindred kindness and love was a bucket of damp tree seeds, some cut grass, a tree stump, and for us to otherwise rest and be.

Sunday morning they took us out to eat at a breakfast buffet. We all came in and took a seat at one of the tables. Walking by the section next to our table I noticed a very cute girl wearing a bow on the front of her long brown hair serving a table. I got up and filled my plate with eggs and other things, finished and got up for my second and third plate. The guy who had got our order at the entrance when we'd come in approached me directly as I looked over the desserts.

“Hey, man,” he said to me, grasping my attention, “I've got a question for you. You see that girl over there?” He motioned toward the girl with the bow. My wide eyes followed the motion and, seeing her stifling either laughter or embarrassment under a tightly sealed smile, I quickly looked down at the floor and nodded my head. She knew she was being talked about and kept from looking our way. My heartbeat quickened out of uncertainty. He continued, “Well, she's really shy, but she said that you look like you're her type. So I wanted to ask you for her, does she seem like she's your type at all?”

My eyes bounced from the floor, to the food, to him, to the plate I held in front of me.

I was completely overwhelmed, but I managed to tell him, “Well, uh, I'm actually pretty shy, too, but, well, I'm kind in the middle of a trip to Alaska.”

“Oh,” he said a little surprised, “Well, would you be willing to take her number at least?”

I didn't really know what to say given the combination of my complete lack of practice with this kind of thing and the complexity of the circumstances I'd found myself in, but I told him yes.

At the table I sat down, still a little overwhelmed, and tried to describe what had happened. Grandma Nancy began poking fun. Waving her finger at me she said, “You're tanned so your face doesn't show it, but I can tell that you're blushing.”

I did call her. I didn't want to insult her by not calling. In fact we ended up going out for ice cream the day before Justin and I left town. I was ecstatic to meet her, but this is where my writing becomes most difficult. I'm forced now to distinguish what, if anything, should be made public, and what should remain private. Will what I write in any way betray the trust of who I write about? When I meet someone and tell them about this journal, if they find their way into my writing new problems arise. Now I'm writing to you and about you, subject and audience becoming one in the same. This makes things difficult, and how much more so in a girl-guy situation. This search for the precarious balance between trust and honesty pervades every paragraph in my subjective non-fiction.

So we went out and had ice cream. We talked about art and the world and where and how we currently found ourselves. More than anything else, I think, we were each glad to meet someone we'd been intrigued by. The whole event had thrown me off, though. It's amazing how much sway a woman can have, even unintentionally.

She parked her car in front of the house when we'd got back. We walked down the street under the darkening sky just to keep talking a little longer. I could no longer see her face in the absence of sun or street lights, but I could feel her expressions through her emphatic voice, and I thought, “Please, don't stop talking.”

Riding through a small town I stop beside a lonely gas station in the noon heat, crouch down in the shadow at a spigot on the wall and refill my water bottle. A man walking by from his truck slows down next to me. I look up and he points to my bicycle and asks where I'm from and where I'm headed.

“I saw the bike and I thought, 'This guy's gotta be on some kind of trip!'” I answer him and then as he goes he leaves me with his parting words, “Yep, do it while you're young,” and the sentence echoes through me.

Above, a few stars began to show in the night sky. She got back into her car, and said goodbye to me and wished me safety. I quietly said goodnight, turned away, and walked through the darkness down the driveway to the house. Then climbing its steps, I listened as the engine of her car turned over and drove away. I stepped in the door, trading one opportunity for another.